


Inheritance

by biscuitlevitation



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms
Genre: BAMF Women, Dragons, Father-Daughter Relationship, Female Protagonist, Feminist Themes, Immortality, Multi, POV Female Character, Parallels, Slow Build, Snow and Ice, The Ice Dragon (GRRM), Unreliable Narrator, White Walkers, Winter, Women Being Awesome, like thousands of years slow
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:55:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28048056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biscuitlevitation/pseuds/biscuitlevitation
Summary: In which Adara chooses to go with the ice dragon to the land of always-winter, meets her true father (who is more winter than man), and eventually goes east, to Westeros, where she must decide whether or not the Night King's war is her own.-Hey, remember the children's book GRRM wrote 16 years before GOT? Y'know how his publishers are insisting it's set in the same universe as ASOIAF, though he allegedly claims otherwise? This is my attempt to mash the two together. Plus, ice dragons are cool and Dany eventually gets to kiss an ice dragon lady.
Relationships: Adara & Ice Dragon, Adara & Night King, Adara/Daenerys Targaryen, Others TBD
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7





	Inheritance

**Author's Note:**

> You can listen to the audiobook [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f20Czv5pUrI), though I highly recommend finding a physical copy! Luis Royo's illustrations are my personal favorites but there are other editions with equally beautiful art, as well.
> 
> Full disclosure: I've mostly only watched the Daenerys and the army of the dead scenes in the GOT TV show, the ONLY GRRM book I've read is The Ice Dragon, and I read it obsessively as a kid. It's very obvious that it was ASOIAF's predecessor, tho. A lot of the themes, terminology, and even worldbuilding are identical. YOU PLAGIARIZED YOURSELF, GEORGIE M'BOY.
> 
> The two main differences in the lore are that seasons change every year instead of lasting for years at a time, and in Adara's homeland (which we'll call Westestos for now) regular dragons can be tamed and ridden by anyone, not just Valyrians. They're also smaller and stupider, on average, than most Valyrian dragons. ICE dragons, however, have never been ridden by anyone but Adara, and freeze anyone who tries to tame them. They also tend to be larger, on average, provided that they don't melt. 
> 
> The explanation the book gives is that Adara was born in a very cold winter, when an ice dragon flew across the moon, and that explains why she was born blue and gains the undying loyalty of a wild ice dragon and why she can touch ice creatures without getting frostbite or killing them with her warmth. This fic offers a more in-depth and lore-laden explanation.
> 
> I know only 3 people, if that, are gonna read this, but I had a BLAST writing it and I am very gay for girls with dragons. Yknow what's better than 1 girl with dragons? TWO girls with dragons. Aegon the Conqueror and I are in complete agreement on that. Not so much with the Roll Tide, tho.

A seven-year old girl sits astride a dragon made of ice, its wings creaking and shedding hoarfrost. Behind her lies her family’s farm, plumes of smoke rising from it like obsidian pillars, covering the summer dawn in a thick haze. Ahead of her lies the land of always-winter, her dragon’s home, a place that will be _her_ home, if she so chooses. The too-warm air smells of sulphur and burning flesh.

There comes a sound almost too faint to recognize. There comes the sound of her father’s scream.

For the first time in all her life, Adara weeps. But she is still more winter’s child than her father’s, and so the tears are cold, freezing where they fall upon her ice dragon’s back. It shudders with relief from the heat; the girl has winter in her heart, in her soul, and no warmth to weaken it.

She thinks, just for a second, of asking the ice dragon to turn around. Thinks of finding her screaming father and too-pretty sister and too-mouthy brother.

But then she thinks of Uncle Hal, falling burning from the sky atop his ugly Brimstone. She knows her ice dragon is stronger, that its breath spells cold and death to all warm creatures, but she never wants to see it fall. The summer has already shrunk it, and its wings groan and shower water with every flap. As it is right now, the fire of its three lesser cousins might melt it completely. Were it winter, things would be different, but it is not winter. 

She realizes, with sickening certainty, that she must condemn either her dragon or her family to die. 

She thinks of her father, how totally he belongs to the summer, but treats only her coldly. How he had wept to Uncle Hal that he thought of how she’d killed her mother every time he touched her. How he’d claimed that she felt nothing, that she did not love, all of four years old and already heartless. How he said he’d once loved her best of all, but loathed to touch her or speak to her unless he was looking for her mother in her.

Was it any wonder that she was a winter child, when summer never wanted her?

The frigid tears came faster now, gifting the ice dragon new strength, and she urged it north, away from her mother’s grave. She did not look back again.

-

The flight is long, but the ice dragon never tires. The colder the air gets, the more strength it gains, and by the time the ground far beneath them is white once more it is approaching its normal size, the moisture in the air freezing against its icy hide.

Even so, Adara cannot stop crying.

It twists its head back often to check on her, bringing one translucent eye close to her face and nudging her with its hard snout. It is as silent as Adara’s weeping, the only noise the crackle of its wings, but wind whistles from its maw in an attempt at a comforting croon.

Adara cannot help but smile at her dragon; a tiny, icy curve of blue lips. She kisses its nose in thanks, the cold sting against her mouth almost sweet in its familiarity. When she pulls back, she notices the spots where her tears have fallen have turned the same unearthly blue as her eyes.

Over the next week, Adara makes herself at home atop the ice dragon’s back. She sleeps without fear, trusting it would never drop her, and amuses herself by tracking its growth day by day. Its teeth and horns creep longer and longer, like icicles, and soon its back is broad enough for Adara to play comfortably. Sometimes, when she asks, it glides instead of flies, so that she may balance on its spines and outstretched tail, which has grown to a near-ridiculous length. The wind snatches her straight off, once, and it wheels back instantly to catch her in its claws. They’re sharp as blades, but it is so careful not to mar her snowy skin.

Adara doesn’t realize she is laughing, at first, the wind snatching it away, but her ice dragon hears her. It always hears her. It arches its neck down to her, cocking its head as if to relish the sound, then carefully takes her in its mouth (now so large it could swallow her whole, if it wished), and gently deposits her between its wings once more.

Adara looks into its clear eyes, curiously growing faintly bluer, and wraps its neck in an embrace. She cannot reach around it entirely, anymore. 

It is the first time she has ever hugged anyone.

-

They have been flying for a week and a day when the ice dragon finally lands. Adara, who always had to be cajoled into eating her sister’s cooking, is not surprised that she still isn’t hungry. She has been scraping frost off her dragon’s scales when she is thirsty, and the cold fills her stomach better than even meat ever did.

The greens and even the grays of the earth have wholly vanished, and everything is covered in a thick blanket of snow that shines in the weak, pale sunlight. The vault of sky is similarly covered in soft gray clouds. One would almost think there was no sun at all, to look upon them. The wind howls almost as loudly on the ground as in the air, sending up stinging stinging sheets of snow from the shapeless drifts.

Her dragon lands heavily, still adjusting to its size—it is bigger than Adara has ever seen it. Its weight sends up a plume of sparkling snow, and Adara laughs and claps as it settles. She uncurls from her spot at the nape of the dragon’s neck, and it lowers one crystalline wing, shot through with veins of blue ice, for her to slide down. She lands in a cottony snowbank, colder than she’s ever been and all the more refreshed for it.

“Now,” Adara says, once she has finished her snow angel. The ice dragon cracks one clear eye (though it shouldn’t need to, because its eyelids are also ice). It has curled around her like a mother cat does its kitten, blocking the wind with its body so that it can hear her. “I promised to build you a castle, didn’t I? Let’s get started!”

There comes a creaking, groaning noise from its chest, nothing like the growls and shrieks of Brimstone when it (and Uncle Hal) were still alive, but still easily recognizable as a complaint. It uses the thin tip of its tail to take her feet out from under her, sending her sprawling painlessly into the snow, and hauls her under its wing.

“You must be tired from all that flying,” Adara realizes, and smiles when it tucks its head in next to her and sighs pointedly. She packs snow into a pillow for her head and burrows down comfortably, chest aching with mingled love and loss, and sleeps deeply.

She dreams of icicle crowns, cold hands, and glowing eyes the same gelid blue as hers. She dreams of her mother, freezing to death next to a roaring fire thanks to the babe in her womb. She dreams of how she was born icy to the touch, with pale blue skin and golden hair.

She wakes in near-total darkness, a faint glow coming from the blue spots on her dragon’s nose where her tears fell. There’s another glow that falls wherever she looks, but she cannot see its source. The air is close and stuffy, despite the chill.

A soft breeze stirs her hair in greeting, and she knows her ice dragon is awake. It goes cross-eyed to examine the blue spot on its nose, and she laughs and gets on tip-tie to kiss it. Her laughter comes easier, the colder it gets, and Adara has always smiled most often with the dragon.

“Good morning,” she whispers. “Or is it night, now?”

The dragon nudges Adara pointedly, and she grabs a tooth to keep from stumbling. It obligingly opens its blue maw wide, and pokes her with its tail until she clambers inside, over three rows of sharp teeth. The space inside is now nearly as big as the mattress she shared with her family in the winters, before—before she left.

She’s distracted from her thoughts as the ice dragon surges upwards, using its wings to scatter the snow that blanketed them as they slept. The ice that forms its mouth is still thin enough that she can make out the light of the moon through it, though only just. She holds on to another jagged tooth to keep from slipping down its smooth throat, wishing absently that she’d brought gloves when she cuts open her hand. The blood is closer to purple than red when she examines it, and it drips sluggishly. It looks dark and ugly against her dragon’s pearly teeth, so she mops it up with the thin skirt of her summer dress. The ice underneath is stained blue, darker than the marks left by her tears, and not glowing at all.

Adara’s dragon lowers its head and deposits her at the top of a drift. She’s small and light enough that she only sinks slightly into it. It examines her with one clear eye as large as her knee, and then wind whistles from its mouth, high and distressed, when it sees her bleeding.

“It’s all right,” Adara coos, stretching to pat its snout with her clean hand. “It was an accident. It’s not your fault.”

It whistles again sharply until she holds out her hand for it to inspect. It opens its mouth again, and Adara doesn’t flinch from its gleaming teeth. Cool breath wafts gently over the wound, stealing the ache and freezing the blood so that it stops dripping. 

“Thank you,” Adara says, and kisses its nose again. The sting is lesser every time. Her ice dragon nuzzles her as gently as it can, considering its head is now the size of a cart, then extends a wing for her to clamber up.

It takes a while to climb—the wing is the smoothest part of its body, other than the inside of its throat, so she keeps sliding back down. The dragon waits patiently, reluctant to pick her up itself, and she eventually manages to hoist herself up the scales of its leg, instead. She settles in the hollow at its nape, reclining against a tall spike lining its spine, and says, “I’ll have to make mittens, to protect my hands when I ride you.”

The ice dragon launches itself into the air, and Adara feels as if she could touch the stars if she tried. Then it opens its mouth and howls like the north wind, and the snowbanks beneath them start to churn.

Dragon after dragon emerges from the snow, shining in the moonlight. She even sees babies, small and see-through beside their opaque white parents. Many of them take flight themselves, dancing and playing through the air together, though her dragon circles them sedately, so as not to drop her.

“You brought me to your nest,” Adara realizes. “Do you all live here, in the summers?”

Her dragon rises above its brethren, snapping its teeth when another of its kind gets a little too close. Adara’s ice dragon is no doubt the grandest in the entire world, and the others know it. They don’t disturb them when her dragon makes it clear it does not want them to.

“You’re the prettiest,” Adara confides, and feels it swell with pride beneath her.

Eventually it turns, and they head south. Adara knows instinctively that _everything_ is south of the ice dragon nesting grounds, and this is a different part of the south than the direction her family’s farm lies in. She wonders, heart skipping slowly in her chest, if they are buried beside her mother now, or maybe just ashes scattered across it.

A few hours later, the ground falls away completely, and a dark, calm ocean replaces it. This must be the Sunrise Sea, which Uncle Hal once told her never gave back the sailors that tried to cross it. It is dotted with floating islands of ice, and the ice dragon lands on the largest, which has a hollow just large enough to accommodate it in the center. Towering spires of ice surround them on every side, though Adara suspects her dragon’s head could peek over them if it sat up and stretched its neck.

“You found me a castle,” she gasps, and hugs one horn when it turns its neck to see her smiling face. Then she slides down its wing (the landing is rougher on ice than snow, that might bruise) and explores their glacier. There are any number of caves within the ice that open into the water below, so she’s careful not to slip. Her dragon gets anxious if she spends too long in a place its head can’t fit, and more than once it snakes the thin tip of its tail after her and pulls her back to its side.

Adara has never been fussed over like this before. The few times her father embraced her, he was looking for her mother in her face, and her siblings always kept their distance. Even Uncle Hal, for all he defended her to her father, only tried to convince her to smile, rather than caring why she did not. 

In contrast, her dragon is like a cow with its calf. It wants her near, like none of her family ever seemed to. Adara gives it many, many kisses in the time she plays in her floating castle.

-

Time passes, in the slow, syrupy way of childhood. The days grow shorter, the nights longer. Her skin slowly tinges blue again, as it was when she was born, and her summer dress grows more and more ragged. The flimsy material cannot withstand an ice dragon’s rough scales. 

They return to the nest each dawn to sleep. The other ice dragons watch her curiously, but her dragon is as possessive of her as she is of it, and snaps its teeth when they venture too close. Adara notices the parents of the transparent dragonlings exhibit the same behavior, and feels her slowly-beating heart swell until it’s fit to burst.

As the nights last longer, Adara sees easier in the dark, and they fly farther and farther afield, until they stop returning to the nest at all. She knows they’ll return with the summer, and does not fret, though she misses her floating castle, freshly locked in ice. Her dragon shows her many strange and awesome sights. It takes her to mountain peaks so high she can barely breathe, and flies through massive curtains of green light that dwarf even the shadow it casts on the ice below.

Adara soon forgets what the sun feels like, sleeping when her dragon does and seeing by moonlight clear as day. They stay in the land of always-winter no matter how cold it gets or how big her dragon grows—it had braved the sun, and flown south every year, solely for her. 

She is not sure how many years pass like this. She grows as slowly as an iceberg, so slowly she had wondered if she was frozen in time as well as in body. She flies with the ice dragon, visits its nest when the days grow long, befriends ice lizards and spiders on the rare occasions her dragon plays in the sky with its fellows rather than her. She is the only creature of flesh and blood rather than water and wind for hundreds of miles, in every direction, and she does not mind.

Adara’s hair has grown almost to her feet when she first sees the Horned Man.

-

Adara’s dragon is not a particularly adventurous creature, and becomes downright fretful when she strays too far from its side. The only place it can stand to fly without her safely on its back is the nesting ground at the top of the world. Adara and the dragonlings, which grow much faster than she does, amuse themselves by whistling to each other, though they know better than to venture from them lest they be spotted from above. She’s certain _her_ dragon would win the resulting squabble with the dragonlings’ parents, but she doesn’t want anything to ruin their lovely hollow in the snow. The sloping walls are packed down nicely, and she’s just finished digging in footholds so that she can climb out herself, rather than relying solely on her dragon to help her.

Besides, summer will be over soon, and she wants her dragon to play to its heart’s content with its own kind before they leave again. Won’t it be lonely, during a long winter with only Adara for company? Won’t it crave the company of creatures that look and act just like it?

She’s grown restless, in recent years, asking to fly farther and farther afield, and it takes longer to return to the nesting grounds each summer. They never go far enough to see men, of course—Adara does not belong with them—but she is always eager for new sights. Her dragon indulges her, but shows little interest in exploration beyond her own enjoyment. It had flown south every year solely for her, those first few years of her life, and it makes her feel safe and happy and wanted. It had braved the sun for her, the summer for her, because it was the one creature in the world that loved her just as fiercely as she loved it.

The seasons seem to go by much more quickly than they had when she was in the south, but Adara and her dragon stay the same.

One winter, she told the ice dragon about the Sunrise Sea, and wondered if the ice that stretched past the horizon every winter would lead them to the other side of it. Perhaps the only reason no one had managed to return was because they hadn’t traveled far enough north to make the crossing.

And every winter after, the ice dragon carries her across the frozen ocean until the nights grow too short and the ice too thin to accommodate the dragon’s weight. Adara always asks to turn back, at that point, terrified her dragon might start to shrink. She knows it can be much smaller than it is now without suffering for it, but she never wants to see it melt as it did in that warm, awful summer morning that smelt of sulphur and scorched flesh.

The ice dragon’s boredom with Adara’s newest project is obvious—it much prefers to play with her in their glacier castle, to let her slide down its wings, to fly her so high she can touch those green, glowing curtains of light. It doesn’t like how tired she gets from clinging to its back for days on end, goes slower than she wants for fear of the wind snatching her right off it again. It can go so much faster without her, so fast she thinks it could easily cross the Sunrise Sea and back over the course of a single winter, but it flatly refuses to go anywhere near its full speed while she rides it. It detests the idea of losing her, and also refuses to carry her in its foot as it did when she first fell from it. Spending so long in the land of always-winter, with hardly any seasonal melt to speak of, has made its claws so massive that someone as small as Adara could slip right through them. It also refuses to let her inside its mouth, because its teeth rise to her waist in height now and it hates when she bleeds. Its shoulders are freckled with dark blue where its scales have cut her still-soft skin over the years, and her summer dress is more hole than cloth, at this point.

Adara sometimes worries about what will happen when it becomes too massive for her to climb onto its back. Its eyes, by now closer to her own shade than clear, and glowing softly from within, are almost as big as she is. It has to squint to see her when she gets too close to its face. Her kisses must feel as insubstantial as snowflakes!

It is with these worries in her head that she spots the figure on the ice below, moving in the opposite direction that they are. West, instead of east. 

Adara has not seen a man in a long, long time, but she can tell this is no ordinary one. His skin is craggy, more like the ice dragon’s scales than her own smooth hide. He has no hair, but there was a ring of frozen horns atop his head, almost like a crown.

His eyes, when he looks up, glow eerily from within. They’re the same blue as hers, and even from so far below she can feel the avarice in them when they look upon her dragon.

“Can we land here?!” she yells, so that the ice dragon can more easily hear her. Its chest groans reluctantly, but it begins to spiral downwards. The sea ice crunches, but does not break, when they land, so Adara takes the time to study the interloper more closely.

He’s finally noticed her atop her dragon’s back, dwarfed by its spines, and his frozen brows are climbing his forehead. She thinks, if he were someone like her brother and her uncle (whose names she cannot easily recall, anymore), his jaw might have dropped.

Adara smacks at one frozen wing until her dragon sets it down. The trip down is longer than it used to be, because its wings are easily the largest part of its already massive body, so she has to hustle back around. She’s worried the Horned Man will be gone by the time she circumnavigates the bulk her dragon determinedly tries to keep between the two humans without accidentally squishing her. (Or at least she thinks he’s human. He looks too much like her for her to contemplate the alternative.)

He’s still there when she manages to slip between the ice dragon’s legs, frozen under its blue gaze, but there’s still more avarice than wariness on his face. His eyes snap back to her when she comes into view, darting from her blue-white skin to her tattered clothes to her golden hair, shining like a beacon under the aurora.

His face is not greedy as he studies her. It’s shocked. Suspicion steals across it. His muscles barely twitch, but she can read his icy facade as easily as she does her dragon’s.  
Adara’s words catch in her throat. She speaks so often to the ice dragon that she’d forgotten how shy she was—cold, sullen, uncaring, her father termed it—around other people, even family. Perhaps especially family. This man is even stranger than she is, but what if he still thinks there is something wrong with her? What if he hates her, tries to hurt her the way those soldiers hurt her father, so badly he screamed?

The Horned Man says nothing, only waits. She thinks he’s been waiting for a very long time. Longer than she’s been alive, though she’s only got the faintest idea of how long that is. She leans into her dragon’s leg for comfort, but it doesn’t look at her, just continues glaring at the Horned Man like it does other ice dragons that get too close to her.

They watch each other for a long time, long enough that the aurora fades, long enough that Adara would be worrying about sunrise if they weren’t so deep into winter. Eventually, her thin legs grow tired, and she clambers up to sit upon one of the ice dragon’s huge feet, very aware of the sharp eyes that watch her every move. When she dares to meet them again, the suspicion is gone, replaced with _recognition_. There is still astonishment, but there is also anger and pride and longing and a million other things that she cannot parse. Most of all, there is _hunger_ , even more so than when he looks at her dragon.

Finally, he opens his mouth, but what comes out is the cracking of ice, rather than words. She cannot quite understand it, but it is as familiar as cradlesong. More so, because as far as she knows, no one ever sang her to sleep. She knows that he’s saying something important, from the expression on his face, the intensity with which he speaks in his strange language. Something monumental. 

He starts to walk.

And then her dragon, still as stone for what must have been hours, mantles its massive wings as if to hide her away. It shrieks like a gale, like the coldest of blizzards, so loud that Adara claps her hands over her ears and thinks the world must be ending. The ice sheet cracks, a giant crevasse opening between them and the Horned Man, and she thinks the only reason her dragon does not lunge forward and shatter him between its teeth is because it does not want to dislodge her, cannot bear to leave her without the shelter of its wings. 

By the time the ice dragon quiets and lets her crawl out from under it, the crevasse is as wide as a canyon, and the Horned Man is gone.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, Beth (Adara's mom) fucked the Night King. How? No idea. He's been around for several thousand years, he walks across the Sunset Sea and bangs the locals sometimes, I guess. I'm proud of her, tho. GET it girl, make the monsterfuckers jealous!
> 
> I also think the Night King would make a good daddy. He RAISED all his White Walkers from infancy, apparently. Imagine going thru the terrible twos with a toddler that can raise the dead. His second goal after the total annihilation of all life in Westeros is to have a family of his own. And you know what? We stan a single father.
> 
> Adara is biased, because at this point she's been physically and mentally a child for decades, but I do think her dad in the book wasn't the best. Who the fuck says their four-year-old is incapable of love and has nothing inside her??? And only hugs her in the winter while he's mourning her mother, then blames the kid for her dying in childbirth???? No wonder she doesn't smile or laugh, jackass. Kids don't have to act the way you want them to in order to be worthy of love. And then he endangers his entire surviving family by refusing to leave in the face of an ENEMY ARMY, is implied to get his older daughter sexually assaulted, and gets his brother killed. Good thing his heartless unloving grade schooler was there to rescue his ass.
> 
> So yeah we're getting some major 10-year-old me wish fulfillment, because I was always so inconsolable that Adara chose her mean family over her loving and badass ice dragon, and the dragon loved her so much it DIED to save them anyway. If I have to pick between the people living and the dragon living, it's OBVIOUSLY gonna be the dragon. Sorry, Adara's family!


End file.
